Benevolent matriarch of a dynasty

The widows of Australian press barons seem to enjoy impressive longevity. Florence Packer and Mary Fairfax, devoted to their husbands' reputations and achievements, have long outlived Sir Frank and Sir Warwick. Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, who has died at the remarkable age of 103, outlived Sir Keith by six decades and lived to see her son build upon and burnish her husband's legacy.

More recently she was quoted as saying, "I can't possibly die. I want to see what Rupert is going to do next." In her own right, she has left the most remarkable and sustained commitment to philanthropy of any Australian.

Elisabeth Joy Greene was born in Melbourne on February 8, 1909, the youngest of three daughters of a wool broker, Rupert Greene, a reckless Anglo-Irish charmer, whom they all loved but whose gambling regularly forced the family to let their Toorak home, Pemberley. The house may have had an Austenian ring but Mrs Greene - Marie ''Bairnie'' de Lancey Forth - was no Mrs Bennet but an intelligent, serene and gritty beauty. Some enterprising and influential friends organised Rupert's appointment as the official starter for the VRC and VATC, a position which forbade him from betting. This reduced but did not eradicate financial crises and surely influenced a sense of thrift in his daughters' lives.

At 14, after several governesses, Elisabeth was sent to board at Clyde, at Mount Macedon, where she thrived, especially in sport. Her godfather, an old family friend, John Riddoch, paid the fees.

Keith Murdoch, 42-year-old Herald editor and power broker, had sought out the 18-year-old Elisabeth, just out of school. He had seen her photo in a society gossip magazine. He told the hostess of a dance he would only attend if Miss Greene was there. They met but did not dance.

The next day he phoned and asked her to Sorrento. To her family's fury, she accepted. Their engagement provoked a storm - in a peculiar turn, Elisabeth's godfather demanded, and had returned, all the gifts he had given to the Greene girls. Keith's friend Dame Nellie Melba was particularly put out but her bullying went largely unnoticed by the happy young bride - unsophisticated but at ease with herself. On June 6, 1928, they were married by Keith's father, Reverend Patrick Murdoch.

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She had accompanied her fiance to a farm near Langwarrin, just behind seaside Frankston, south-east of Melbourne. He renamed it Cruden Farm after his grandfather's Free Church parish in north-east Scotland. They saw a pleasant, undistinguished cottage and a rudimentary garden and were taken by undulating paddocks and surrounding bush.

Keith presented Cruden to Elisabeth as a wedding present, he took command and, after she rejected one elaborate Italianate plan, he chose young garden writer and designer Edna Walling to design the front garden. Young Mrs Murdoch was dismayed at not being consulted. So what might have been an impressive partnership between owner and designer never took root but the essence of Walling's plans were accepted, adopted and, as the decades rolled on, adapted by its owner whose affinity for the farm grew with each season.

While Walling's stone walls are probably the most valued legacy, the most striking feature of the design is a lemon-scented, eucalyptus-lined drive planted by both Murdochs and their farm manager in 1930. Much of the garden was destroyed by a bushfire in 1944 but the gums survived and today 130 of them grace the entrance to what is now one of the country's most celebrated gardens. It must be rare to find a garden anywhere in the world, let alone Australia, that has been nurtured and shaped, lived in and shared by the same adult for more than 80 years.

It began as a weekend escape for Keith but became his family's home and the focus of his wife's life. During the Depression they employed men, desperate for work, to build stables and outbuildings. A few years later Keith arrived home in a second-hand Rolls-Royce; Elisabeth ordered him to return it the following day.

In 1933 Keith was knighted and Elisabeth became Lady Murdoch at the age of 24. During the war, Billy Hughes and Joe Lyons came to visit the family.

In 1952, Sir Keith died in his sleep at the farm. A widow at 43, Elisabeth decided to make it her only home and she planted a copper beech in her husband's memory. This tree was intended to anchor the redesigned borders but at the same time the farm itself became the mainstay of her life.

She threw herself into humanitarian work, particularly Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital - "I felt obliged to do all I could to justify my existence … Giving money is very easy. You've got to be involved,'' she would say.

In 1963, she became Dame Elisabeth but assumed none of the airs of a grande dame. Her feet remained firmly planted and her hands in the soil at Cruden. There was also an abiding frugality, born perhaps of her devil-may-care father's ruinous spending and a Presbyterian horror of ostentation. Like her sister Sylvia, Elisabeth had an almost unworldly unpretentiousness and took no real interest in clothes or fashion. She spent money on the garden rather than herself but even the latter has not been at the expense of her philanthropy. She also seemed impervious to the elements. For eight decades she refused heating in the house, she resisted hairdressers, and one year eschewed a trip abroad so she could install a pool in the garden.

In 1968, she was invited to be the first woman trustee of the new National Gallery of Victoria - a project that had long been championed by Sir Keith. She was awarded an honorary doctorate of laws by the University of Melbourne for her contribution to research, arts and philanthropy.

The early '70s brought new life and fresh challenges. She helped her daughter Janet to establish Taralye, an oral language centre for deaf children, became a driving force in the establishment of the McClelland Gallery, and also helped set up the Victorian Tapestry Workshop. In the 1970s when she learnt that Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser's cabinet considered her as a possible candidate for governor-general, she was stunned and dismissed the idea as absurd. In the '80s, she and her family helped to establish the Murdoch Institute for Research into Birth Defects (now the Murdoch Children's Research Institute). In 2003 such ventures led to her being given the Great Australian Philanthropy Award by Research Australia. In 2005 she was named Victorian of the year. In 2009 she was present at the opening of Melbourne Recital Centre's Elisabeth Murdoch Hall and was still enjoying concerts there into her 104th year.

A young gardener, Michael Morrison, came to Cruden in 1971. While farming continued, the garden grew; its beauty and sweep almost in defiance of the urban sprawl that now surrounds it. Since the early '80s the public has come to share the garden.

Disarmingly modest, a ready laugh, she was selfless, optimistic and tolerant, believing in the power of good, thinking the best of people. And yet this daughter and wife of church-going folk did not believe in a personal God. She told Andrew Denton (she was 99), "I believe that somehow there is a higher spirit but I don't quite know how to define but I don't believe that, you know, when we die we go to heaven or anything like that."

Elisabeth Murdoch is survived by her son Rupert, daughters Anne and Janet and some 70 other descendants. Another daughter, Helen, died in 2004.